The Media's Portrayal of Beauty Towards Female Youths
Introduction
The television is a powerful form of media that is viewed by audiences all around the world. The mediated images that it depicts have proven to have a great impact toward its viewers. Youth in general are an easily influenced demographic because they want to fit in with their peers and relate to the things they see in television. This is especially true to female youths, as they have had a long history of negative and inferior representation in society. Television continues to portray this image of negativity using stereotypes to target these easily impressionable people. Through both programming and advertising, young females are more susceptible to the influence over their own body and mind. The way they look at themselves is therefore modified to become acceptable as deemed by television and media standards.
This report will discuss the pressure for female youth to conform to a specific standard of beauty within television, while it also states how television creates a distorted sense of reality amongst youths based on what they see and how they interpret it in their own lives.
How it began
Media has always used hegemony to make the audience think in a certain way. The same can be said for how television has used females to create a certain ideology towards the female audience. The female character that is shown on television is a distorted reflection of reality, being mostly misrepresented and hyper-exaggerated stereotypes. “Female pre-adolescents and adolescents will generally consider advertising models to be superior in terms of physical attractiveness” (Martin & Gentry, 22), so in most cases, when females see their gender presented on television, they feel that they should live up to the standards of that beauty. Advertisers have realized this way of thinking and have capitalized on the opportunity to direct consumers to products that have gained their interest. The television programs that have the most money from advertisers are also the most watched, which means these programs will have the biggest audience and therefore be the most influential. This standard of beauty in female representation then becomes the accepted reality of society, and girls grow up to believe that this is the representation they should become.
Conforming to the Pressure
Instead of promoting the idea that unique is beautiful, advertising companies have created an idyllic image of female beauty that everyone must emulate in order to be accepted in society. Youths have been increasingly lead to believe that “the cultural practices of cosmetics, plastic surgery, dieting, fitness programs, and image management go hand in hand with an image culture that incites women to see themselves and their appearance as inadequate in some way and in need of improvement” (Sturken & Cartwright, 82). For example, although the Venus razor ad is an advertisement towards women and female empowerment, it still only depicts models that are beautiful, thin and relatively perfect as the ideal woman. Its connotation is that women must adjust themselves to suit the ideology that hair removal is a necessary quality in women in order to be beautiful. Similarly, on the television program Gossip Girl, there is a clique of girls who are addicted to their self-image, fashion, gossip and beauty. Being beautiful, popular and a part of the “in-crowd” are the stereotypes that young women have to emulate because they see them on television. These are obvious forms of social behaviour in reality, but on television they are stereotypically portrayed as fact, leading girls to a misrepresented sense of the world.
Reality: Distorted
The concept of reality is depicted as a distortion in human lives, where the real and unreal are able to intermingle with one another. Female youths become frustrated as their portrayal of a perfect beauty is seemingly impossible to attain. In beer advertisements, women are used to market the product but are implied that if they are beautiful, they will end up attracting the men. They appear to be under the control of the male gender, often attending to their every whim. This idea then is slowly embedded into female viewers that eventually believe in this ideology as reality. The audience thinks that whatever happens in television will reflect their real lives because they use storylines that appeal to human emotion. The more a young female is bombarded with mediated images of a distorted reality, the more they begin to lose a sense of what is real within their own lives. The way one is suppose to view the world is not entirely based on their lived experiences, since “television may not only reflect contemporary standards in gender roles, but may also generate such standards” (Hess & Grant, 371). This enforces the idea that the lived reality and the mediated world are both interconnected to influence the behaviours of the viewers.
The Stakeholders
The main stakeholders are the television and advertising corporations that have created the superficial image of beauty. They control what is shown on television, and how the images are shown. For advertising companies, they give their products intrinsic worth which is then projected onto the consumers who buy into their brands. “Advertising is central to the way in which commodities are given particular qualities and values that they do not have innately” (Sturken & Cartwright, 199), hence the women who buy these products feel they have acquired these particular qualities. In television programming, the shows often focus on topics of interest that will generate the most viewers, often including female stereotypes and misrepresentations.
Another main stakeholder that promotes a certain standard of beauty, and perhaps the most important of all, is the audience itself. They are considered the main stakeholder because they accept the representations and behaviours portrayed on television, all the while encouraging the act of setting standards to how beauty is perceived. “Indeed our subjectivities, are mediated and constructed in part through our consumption and use of commodities” (Sturken & Cartwright, 198). Not only is the audience accepting to the standards, but they also construct their own identities based on the products that are marketed towards them. For example, when the show Ugly Betty aired, it broke the misconception that only the beautiful can become the stars of their shows. This caused a dramatic shift in how people viewed what it meant to be beautiful, while also strengthening their own notions of attractiveness. Since then, marketing campaigns have changed their strategies to promote beauty within everyone, and not just specifically the model-types.
Conclusion
Young, female audiences are constantly faced with the pressures of having to maintain a certain standard of beauty, one that can potentially affect their physical and emotional portrayal of the world. Feeling the need to lose weight in order to achieve a “normal” figure, television has certainly played a large role in the condescending attitude towards the female gender. What needs to be done in order to stop the stereotyping? How will a change in attitude affect the way television is viewed? The answers are out there, as long as the hope for a better ideology is kept alive.
Beer commercial depicting an "ideal" image of a women.
Works Cited
Hess, Donna J., and Geoffrey W. Grant. "Prime-Time Television and Gender-Role Behavior." Teaching Sociology 10 (1983): 371-88. JSTOR. 4 Feb. 2009 <http://www.jstor.org/stable/1317366>.
Martin, Mary C., and James W. Gentry. "Stuck in the Model Trap: The Effects of Beautiful Models in Ads on Female Pre-Adolescents and Adolescents." Journal of Advertising 26 (2007): 19-34. JSTOR. 4 Feb. 2009 <http://www.jstor.org/stable/4189031>.
Sturken, Marita, and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking : An Introduction to Visual Culture. New York: Oxford UP, 2001.
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Individual Research Assignment
The Media's Portrayal of Beauty Towards Female Youths
Introduction
The television is a powerful form of media that is viewed by audiences all around the world. The mediated images that it depicts have proven to have a great impact toward its viewers. Youth in general are an easily influenced demographic because they want to fit in with their peers and relate to the things they see in television. This is especially true to female youths, as they have had a long history of negative and inferior representation in society. Television continues to portray this image of negativity using stereotypes to target these easily impressionable people. Through both programming and advertising, young females are more susceptible to the influence over their own body and mind. The way they look at themselves is therefore modified to become acceptable as deemed by television and media standards.
This report will discuss the pressure for female youth to conform to a specific standard of beauty within television, while it also states how television creates a distorted sense of reality amongst youths based on what they see and how they interpret it in their own lives.
How it began
Media has always used hegemony to make the audience think in a certain way. The same can be said for how television has used females to create a certain ideology towards the female audience. The female character that is shown on television is a distorted reflection of reality, being mostly misrepresented and hyper-exaggerated stereotypes. “Female pre-adolescents and adolescents will generally consider advertising models to be superior in terms of physical attractiveness” (Martin & Gentry, 22), so in most cases, when females see their gender presented on television, they feel that they should live up to the standards of that beauty. Advertisers have realized this way of thinking and have capitalized on the opportunity to direct consumers to products that have gained their interest. The television programs that have the most money from advertisers are also the most watched, which means these programs will have the biggest audience and therefore be the most influential. This standard of beauty in female representation then becomes the accepted reality of society, and girls grow up to believe that this is the representation they should become.
Conforming to the Pressure
Instead of promoting the idea that unique is beautiful, advertising companies have created an idyllic image of female beauty that everyone must emulate in order to be accepted in society. Youths have been increasingly lead to believe that “the cultural practices of cosmetics, plastic surgery, dieting, fitness programs, and image management go hand in hand with an image culture that incites women to see themselves and their appearance as inadequate in some way and in need of improvement” (Sturken & Cartwright, 82). For example, although the Venus razor ad is an advertisement towards women and female empowerment, it still only depicts models that are beautiful, thin and relatively perfect as the ideal woman. Its connotation is that women must adjust themselves to suit the ideology that hair removal is a necessary quality in women in order to be beautiful. Similarly, on the television program Gossip Girl, there is a clique of girls who are addicted to their self-image, fashion, gossip and beauty. Being beautiful, popular and a part of the “in-crowd” are the stereotypes that young women have to emulate because they see them on television. These are obvious forms of social behaviour in reality, but on television they are stereotypically portrayed as fact, leading girls to a misrepresented sense of the world.
Reality: Distorted
The concept of reality is depicted as a distortion in human lives, where the real and unreal are able to intermingle with one another. Female youths become frustrated as their portrayal of a perfect beauty is seemingly impossible to attain. In beer advertisements, women are used to market the product but are implied that if they are beautiful, they will end up attracting the men. They appear to be under the control of the male gender, often attending to their every whim. This idea then is slowly embedded into female viewers that eventually believe in this ideology as reality. The audience thinks that whatever happens in television will reflect their real lives because they use storylines that appeal to human emotion. The more a young female is bombarded with mediated images of a distorted reality, the more they begin to lose a sense of what is real within their own lives. The way one is suppose to view the world is not entirely based on their lived experiences, since “television may not only reflect contemporary standards in gender roles, but may also generate such standards” (Hess & Grant, 371). This enforces the idea that the lived reality and the mediated world are both interconnected to influence the behaviours of the viewers.
The Stakeholders
The main stakeholders are the television and advertising corporations that have created the superficial image of beauty. They control what is shown on television, and how the images are shown. For advertising companies, they give their products intrinsic worth which is then projected onto the consumers who buy into their brands. “Advertising is central to the way in which commodities are given particular qualities and values that they do not have innately” (Sturken & Cartwright, 199), hence the women who buy these products feel they have acquired these particular qualities. In television programming, the shows often focus on topics of interest that will generate the most viewers, often including female stereotypes and misrepresentations.
Another main stakeholder that promotes a certain standard of beauty, and perhaps the most important of all, is the audience itself. They are considered the main stakeholder because they accept the representations and behaviours portrayed on television, all the while encouraging the act of setting standards to how beauty is perceived. “Indeed our subjectivities, are mediated and constructed in part through our consumption and use of commodities” (Sturken & Cartwright, 198). Not only is the audience accepting to the standards, but they also construct their own identities based on the products that are marketed towards them. For example, when the show Ugly Betty aired, it broke the misconception that only the beautiful can become the stars of their shows. This caused a dramatic shift in how people viewed what it meant to be beautiful, while also strengthening their own notions of attractiveness. Since then, marketing campaigns have changed their strategies to promote beauty within everyone, and not just specifically the model-types.
Conclusion
Young, female audiences are constantly faced with the pressures of having to maintain a certain standard of beauty, one that can potentially affect their physical and emotional portrayal of the world. Feeling the need to lose weight in order to achieve a “normal” figure, television has certainly played a large role in the condescending attitude towards the female gender. What needs to be done in order to stop the stereotyping? How will a change in attitude affect the way television is viewed? The answers are out there, as long as the hope for a better ideology is kept alive.
Works Cited
Hess, Donna J., and Geoffrey W. Grant. "Prime-Time Television and Gender-Role Behavior." Teaching Sociology 10 (1983): 371-88. JSTOR. 4 Feb. 2009 <http://www.jstor.org/stable/1317366>.
Martin, Mary C., and James W. Gentry. "Stuck in the Model Trap: The Effects of Beautiful Models in Ads on Female Pre-Adolescents and Adolescents." Journal of Advertising 26 (2007): 19-34. JSTOR. 4 Feb. 2009 <http://www.jstor.org/stable/4189031>.
Sturken, Marita, and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking : An Introduction to Visual Culture. New York: Oxford UP, 2001.